Another Summer with Eric Rohmer

Before becoming Eric Rohmer, Schérer tried his hand at a career in literature, writing his first and only novel, Élisabeth, under the name Gilbert Cordier. Begun in 1939, when Rohmer was eighteen, Élisabeth was completed in 1944 and published—and promptly ignored—in 1946. McNally Editions has just released a new translation by Aaron Kerner, and in his review for the New Yorker, Richard Brody writes that “Rohmer’s fame as a director sparks automatic curiosity about his novel, but Élisabeth is far more than a footnote. It would be a rewarding, exciting read even if the identity of its author were unfamiliar . . . Though the story of Élisabeth is simple, the novel is something of a cubistic puzzle.”

The story plays out “over the course of three sweltering days in August of 1939,” writes Nick Pinkerton in Metrograph’s Journal, and it revolves around a country home that Pinkerton surmises must be around “thirty or forty miles” east of Paris. Élisabeth Roby, a doctor’s wife, hosts Michel, a man in his twenties engaged to a somewhat older woman, Irène; Bernard, the Robys’ son, about the same age as Michel; and Bernard’s cousin, Claire.

“No irrevocable harm will come to anyone in the course of Rohmer’s novel, but the possibility of it hangs over every page, like muggy late summer air,” writes Pinkerton, adding that “in the manner of its telling, Élisabeth strays very far from what one might expect from Eric Rohmer  . . . [T]aken as a whole, it is a work of surprising stylistic promiscuity.”

The new edition arrives with a foreword by André Aciman, the novelist best known for Call Me by Your Name. “If one can isolate a feature of Élisabeth later inscribed in so many of Rohmer’s films, it is that everyone has been put on time-out,” writes Aciman. “As Huguette, a character in the novel, remarks, it’s a world where ‘everything just devolves into flirtation.’ That the Second World War is merely a month away is the furthest thing from their thoughts.”

Writing for Zona Motel, Mesha Maren vehemently disagrees. Rohmer “has not created a world in which the war will never happen, he has created the intense hothouse environment of a world in which the war is always and forever just about to happen—a story set on a precipice, a story where the reader’s knowledge of the after exerts tremendous pressure on the just before.”

In 1949, three years after Élisabeth came and went without many noticing, Rohmer submitted a collection of stories he was calling Moral Tales to his publisher, who turned him down. In 2014, Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, the authors of a widely admired Rohmer biography, edited a new edition of the collection.

“Neither bad nor brilliant,” wrote Serge Kaganski in a brief review that ran in Film Comment, “these little, dialogue-heavy stories were written in a classical, formal, and precise idiom, and they’re compartmentalized and not without a certain coolness. But if you don’t come to them expecting to discover a lost literary classic, they’re nonetheless fascinating insofar as they reveal the genealogy of a large part of Rohmer’s filmography.”

Here we find what Kaganski called “the first drafts” of the cycle of films known as Six Moral Tales, which Ginette Vincendeau has described as “cerebral yet humorous variations on the theme of love and deception in which male narrators are faced with the ethical dilemma of having to choose between women.” A series of all six films is currently playing at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles through the end of the month and has just opened at New York’s Metrograph before heading to the Music Box Theatre in Chicago on July 24, and to the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in August.

The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne’s Career, both from 1963 and shot in black-and-white 16 mm, “herald Rohmer’s unparalleled ability to construct complex and absorbing stories out of seemingly banal characters and undramatic situations,” wrote Vincendeau. “Although he said, ‘We must show what is beyond behavior, while knowing that we can only show behavior,’ his is a cinema of behavior that also delves into psychological complexity. For Rohmer, the ‘moral tale’ was ‘not a moralistic tale but a story that describes not just what people do but what goes through people’s minds while they do it.’”

“The tales of Six Moral Tales do not have ‘morals,’” wrote Kent Jones in his 2006 essay on My Night at Maud’s (1969). “Rather, they are stories of people in the process of making choices that may or may not be moral, examining the basis on which those choices are made, and trying to divine the distance between the real and the ideal in the process.” “Filmed in lush, crisp black and white, during a snowy Parisian winter, by the great Nestor Almendros,” My Night at Maud’s “is the most beautiful of Rohmer’s films,” declared programmer David Schwartz in 2008.

La collectionneuse (1967) is “a strong, sensuously lush, deceptively slight film, a Riviera fruit with a bitter, uncompromising aftertaste,” wrote Phillip Lopate in 2006. “The sense of contrast in an earthly paradise in which the loveliest landscapes serve as ironic background for the pettiest exchanges is heightened by Almendros’s extraordinary color photography, with its warm brown tones and deep, rich blues; its translation of the phenomenon of heat into light through the use of natural instead of artificial illumination and mirrors for softening; its pushing of film stocks to the limit in night scenes and shade shooting during the day to avoid the sun’s dramatic changes—all these techniques, which would become hallmarks of Almendros’s, and Rohmer’s, later styles, were worked out for the first time in La collectionneuse, which the cinematographer, not surprisingly, came to regard as his favorite film.”

Of all six tales, “none seems more indigenous to cinema than Claire’s Knee (1970),” wrote Molly Haskell. The crux here is the image of “a pretty blonde teenager on a ladder, becoming the fulcrum of an exquisite dissertation on the perversity of desire. The idea and the image are one, forever circling and intertwined in these exquisite meditations on the anomalies of attraction, which seem to be all about the female of the species, even when the central figure, the desiring and rationalizing protagonist, is male. Of all the (mostly European, or non-American) directors truly interested in women—that is, who put them repeatedly at the center of their work—none has been so fascinated by the spectrum of womankind, and girlkind (a separate breed in Rohmer, and rightly so), and examined our sex with such a fine mixture of dispassion and empathy.”

“As if proving the thesis tested throughout Six Moral Tales,” wrote Armond White in his essay on Love in the Afternoon (1972), “Rohmer closes the series with an optimistic view of the ways in which women and men eternally negotiate their trust and companionship, seeking a resolution to their spiritual foundering on their quest toward the divine.”

Anyone unable to catch these films in these four cities will want to know that all of them are part of a program of fourteen Rohmer films now up on the Criterion Channel. And that includes The Green Ray (1986), whose fortieth anniversary Eleanor Brady is celebrating at Little White Lies as “an enduring portrait of loneliness amid life’s ever changing seasons.”